Chronic exposure to an environmental noise permanently disturbs sleep in rats: inter-individual vulnerability

Chronic exposure to an environmental noise (EN) induces sleep disturbances. However, discrepancies exist in the literature since many contradictory conclusions have been reported. These disagreements are largely due to inappropriate evaluation of sleep and also to uncontrolled and confounding factors such as sex, age and also inter-individual vulnerability. Based on a recently validated animal model, aims of the present study were (i) to determine the effects of a chronic exposure to EN on sleep and (ii) to evaluate the inter-individual vulnerability of sleep to EN. For this purpose, rats were exposed during 9 days to EN. Results show that a chronic exposure to EN restricts continually amounts of slow wave sleep (SWS) and paradoxical sleep (PS) and fragments these two sleep stages with no habituation effect. Results also evidence the existence of subpopulations of rats that are either resistant or vulnerable to these deleterious effects of EN on sleep and especially on SWS amounts, bouts number and bout duration. Furthermore, importance of SWS debt and daily decrease of SWS bout duration are correlated to each others and both correlate to the amplitude of the locomotor reactivity to novelty, a behavioral measure of reactivity to stress. This last result suggests that this psychobiological profile of subjects, known to induce profound differences in neural and endocrine systems, could be responsible for their SWS vulnerability under a chronic EN exposure.